The present article seeks to provide an answer to the following
question: according to which mechanisms may a pattern of word formation
develop a new meaning? In order to keep the task to a manageable size
only changes will be considered, the result of which stays within the
same type of pattern (affixation, compounding, etc.). Hence, we will not
discuss how affixes develop out of compounds or similar phenomena. The
only scholar who, to the best of my knowledge, has addressed this issue
in a systematic and comprehensive manner is Jaberg (1905), who claimed
that semantic change in affixation is always the result of semantic
change in individual words' plus reanalysis. Our study will reveal,
however, that, though this is in fact the most common scenario, there is
yet another, hitherto ignored mechanism of semantic change in word
formation where no lexical change is involved. This" mechanism,
which will be called "'approximation," allows a mismatch
to arise between a word formation pattern and a neologism formed
according to it, if the distance is bridged by metaphor or metonymy.

Thus, according to this analysis, OHG slafkamara, (4) originally
meaning 'room (kamara) for sleep (slaf),' has been
reinterpreted as 'room for sleeping (slaf).' The semantic
change here is very subtle, almost imperceptible on purely extensional
grounds, as is generally the case between a verb and its corresponding
action noun: the difference is normally characterized as one between an
activity viewed as such in the case of the verb and the same activity
viewed as an entity in the case of the action noun.

Somewhat more concrete but also more intricate is the semantic
evolution that led Latin -aticus, a suffix originally forming relational
adjectives like herbaticus 'relating to grass' (from herb-
'grass'), to end up in French as a collective suffix (cf.
plumage 'plumage,' from plume 'feather') and as an
action noun suffix (cf. lavage 'washing,' from lay- 'to
wash'). According to Fleischman (1977), both changes presuppose the
use of-aticus in Late Latin as a nominal suffix designating taxes, a new
function which arose through the ellipsis of the noun meaning
'tax' (census, tributum, etc.) in noun phrases of the form
census, tributum, etc. + relational adjective in -aticus/um. Thus, for
example, as early as 722, herbaticum is attested with the meaning
'payment for right to pasture stock' (Fleischman 1977: 29).
The change from 'tax' to collective meaning is explained in
the following terms by Fleischman:

Taxes on goods and agricultural products were frequently paid in
kind rather than in money. From the meaning 'tax paid in a
particular commodity' to that of 'the commodity itself'
is but a short step semantically, and given the fact that the majority
of such commodities were, grammatically speaking, collectives or mass
nouns, a number of Old French tax designations thus acquired an
additional collective meaning, cf. cortillage ([left arrow] cortil
'small enclosure') 'tax on garden produce,'
'vegetables, garden produce'; [...]. (Fleischman 1977: 91)

The same kind of explanation is given for the rise of the action
meaning:

In addition to commodities, work activities were also taxed,
notably those in which the subordinate utilized the facilities belonging
to the lord or for which he had to obtain the lord's permission.
The passage from 'tax on a given activity' to 'the
activity itself' to 'verbal action signifying such an
activity' (and eventually to 'verbal action per se') is a
logical semantic transition and one which probably resulted in a number
of tax designations' coming to function concurrently as action
nouns (especially in cases of deverbal derivation). (Fleischman 1977:
92)

Every morphologist could supply many more examples of this kind
from any language familiar to him. However, though the phenomenon in
itself has been well-known since the nineteenth century and pertinent
observations on single cases abound in the literature, it is surprising
that, to the best of my knowledge, no scholar seems to have tackled the
problem in a systematic and comprehensive manner. No systematic
treatment of our problem may be found in general handbooks such as Paul
(1975 [1880]), Breal (1924 [1897]), Sturtevant (1917), Bloomfield (1984
[1933]), Anttila (1989), Hock (1991), or Lehmann (1992), nor in
Malkiel's (1966) monographic article or in collective volumes on
historical semantics (and word formation) like Fisiak (1985) or Blank
and Koch (1999). The same is true for language-specific histories of
word formation like Henzen (1965 [1947]), Marchand (1969 [1962]), Nyrop
(1908), or Meyer-Lubke (1966 [1921]), the most complete treatment being
that of Leumann (1963: [section] 167).

The only exception seems to be Jaberg's (1905) substantial
review of Roediger (1904), the first monograph in Romance linguistics
devoted to the semantic development of an affix. Jaberg's theory of
semantic change in word formation is stated in such a succinct manner
that it will be best to quote it verbatim here. He starts out with a
premise on the nature of the meaning of suffixes: (5)

The second one of these methodological claims is undoubtedly
correct. What I would like to investigate in this article is whether
this is also true of Jaberg's first claim. (8) This claim has the
merit of being easily falsifiable in principle: it will be sufficient to
find cases where the new meaning of a pattern of word formation is not
explainable as the result of semantic change in individual words
followed by a reanalysis which attributes the semantic features
resulting from the change to the pattern itself.

In studies on linguistic change it is customary now to distinguish
between mechanisms and paths of change (cf., e.g., Jurafsky 1996;
Traugott and Dasher 2002: 1). The process of change itself is usually
divided into three phases: the individual act of innovation, the
diffusion of the innovation through the speech community (also called
"conventionalization"), and the resultant state in the
language system. And with respect to innovation, at least two aspects
are usually distinguished: the mechanisms through which the innovation
comes about and the motives behind the innovation. Relying on this
terminology, we can now define the scope of this article more precisely:
we will restrict ourselves to the investigation of the mechanisms of
innovation.

Claims about mechanisms of semantic innovation in word formation
put forward in this article are meant to be valid for all natural
languages, even though examples will be drawn exclusively from Latin,
Romance, German, and English. The reason for the choice of such a
restrictive sample of languages is that these happen to be the only ones
the author is sufficiently familiar with to be able to separate with
some confidence the wheat from the chaff in the relevant literature. In
fact, though descriptions of cases of semantic change in word formation
abound, I have found only relatively few whose empirical foundation was
sufficiently broad and whose metalanguage was sufficiently explicit to
serve as valid examples for our purposes. One of the subsidiary goals of
this article, thus, will also be to elaborate a more differentiated and
better-defined terminology that might prove useful in future
descriptions of semantic change in word formation. In this endeavor, I
have tried to do justice to those linguists who first described the
relevant phenomena by generally adopting their terminological proposals,
though not always their definitions and their analyses. As far as the
examples are concerned, quality is more important than quantity: in
principle it would suffice to give one single example for each mechanism
that will be postulated, but this one example should not be open to
alternative interpretations. One way of challenging the present theory
of semantic change in word formation will thus simply consist in
pointing out a more plausible alternative interpretation for some
example. This, however, would only be problematic for the theory if no
other convincing example were to be given to illustrate a postulated
mechanism. A more serious objection to my theory, given its universalist
claims, would consist in adducing examples of semantic change in word
formation that are not accounted for by the theory, a line of
argumentation which I will adopt myself against Jaberg's theory.
Last but not least, the theory is also open to purely conceptual
criticism which would show that some of its mechanisms can be derived
from other elements of the theory or some more general theory yet to be
proposed.

2. Natural vs. artificial semantic change

As we have seen, Jaberg's hypothesis excludes that affixes may
change their meaning independently of a change in meaning of at least
one word they originally formed part of. Now, however, cases of this
kind clearly do exist, in languages for specific purposes at least.

In chemistry, for example, as shown by Corbin and Paul
(2000:55-58), the prefixes cis- and trans- have been given new meanings
only partially deducible from their meanings in common language. In
standard language, our two prefixes serve to locate the referent of the
head noun of a noun phrase with respect to the referent of the base of
the prefixed adjective, which is conceptualized as a frontier: cisalpine
region, for example, means 'region located on this side of the
Alps' (from the point of view of the speaker/writer), while
transalpine region means 'region located on the other side of the
Alps.' In order to understand the usage in chemistry, look at
Figure 1 displaying the structure of cis-2-butene and trans-2-butene. As
one can see, cis-2-butene and trans-2-butene have the same chemical
formula ([C.sub.4][H.sub.8]), but a different disposition of the atoms.
The use of cis- is due to the location of the hydrogene atoms on
"this" side of the C=C barrier in cis-2-butene, while one of
them is located on the "other" side in trans-2-butene (hence
the use of trans-). What differentiates usage in chemistry and in
standard language is the fact that the base noun (butene) of the
adjective does not refer to the barrier (C=C), but constitutes the
hyperonym of the resulting formation (both cis-2-butene and
trans-2-butene are kinds of butane). The use of cis- and trans- in
chemistry thus, though still reminiscent of standard usage, has been
adapted somewhat artificially for terminological purposes.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The same holds for a prefix like mega-, from Ancient Greek megas
'big, enormous,' which, together with other metrological
prefixes (or combining forms, if you prefer), was endowed with a more
precise meaning, viz. 'one million x' (megahertz, megabyte,
etc.), at the eleventh 'Conference generale des poids et
mesures' in 1960. (9) The meaning in such cases obviously did not
arise through semantic change in one or more words containing these
prefixes followed by a reanalysis attributing the new meaning to the
prefix itself, but through an intentional act of redefinition of the
affix's meaning.

Even though examples of this kind could easily be multiplied, it
would seem somewhat unfair to consider Jaberg's hypothesis to be
falsified by them since Jaberg certainly intended his hypothesis to bear
on natural semantic change only. I will thus follow Gloning's
(1996: 255) view that metalinguistic semantic stipulations of the kind
we have seen should not count as part of a theory of meaning but of a
broader theory of communication, and consequently restrict the following
discussion to natural semantic change only.

The main contention of my article will be that, apart from
artificial stipulations, there are two fundamental types of mechanism of
semantic change in word formation, which I will call
"reinterpretation" (10) and "approximation." (11)
Only the various kinds of reinterpretation, it will be argued, are
compatible with Jaberg's hypothesis.

3. Reinterpretation

In order to understand why reinterpretation of word formation
patterns is so widespread, it is necessary to recall some general
properties of human communication and of word formation.

As far as human communication in general is concerned, we will view
it as an activity where a speaker (or writer) tries to influence a
hearer (or reader) with the aid of mainly verbal signs. Since the
speaker's message is underdetermined by the verbal signs alone and
has to be supplemented by all kinds of inferences on the part of the
hearer, the danger of misinterpretation is a constitutive aspect of
human communication (cf., e.g., Keller 1995:132-146). While this source
of change is hearer-based, another important source is speaker-based,
namely, the habit of many speakers to use linguistic signs in innovative
ways in order to augment their impact on the hearer.

With respect to word formation, we will base ourselves on a
conception of the lexicon not as "eine fertig daliegende
Masse," (12) but as "ein fortgehendes Erzeugnis und
Wiedererzeugnis des wortbildenden Vermogens" (13) (Humboldt 1836:
109-110; quoted in Marle 1990: 267). Under this conception,
"existing words, both simplex and complex, are subjected to a
constant, never-ending inspection on the part of the speakers of the
language" (Marle 1990: 267), and in the course of such inspections
all kinds of new relationships between words may be established, giving
rise, in some cases, to new patterns of word formation.

Equally important is the distinction, traditional in German studies
on word formation at least since the 1970s (cf. Rainer 1993: 132-133),
between Wortbedeutung (lit. 'word meaning')--also referred to
as Wortschatzbedeutung (lit. 'vocabulary meaning')--and
Wortbildungsbedeutung (lit. 'word formation meaning'). The
first of these terms refers to the lexical meaning of a complex word,
including all idiosyncratic aspects, while the latter focuses on that
part of a complex word's meaning that may be attributed to the
pattern itself by which the word was formed. This distinction is most
obvious in nominal compounds, whose word formation meaning is often said
to be only 'an [N.sub.2] which has something to do with
[N.sub.1],' while the word meaning of single compounds may
additionally present all kinds of encyclopedic information or
idiosyncrasies. Word meanings can thus often present a semantic surplus
with respect to the word formation meaning, and this surplus may
eventually be reinterpreted as part of the word formation pattern
itself, as we will see, for example, in Section 3.1.3 with respect to
German compounds with Atom- as a first constituent.

A third property which is crucial for understanding semantic change
in patterns of word formation is the relational nature of the semantics
of such patterns. Contrary to monomorphemic words, the semantics of
patterns of word formation always presents a relation between a constant
and a variable (in the case of derivation) or between two variables (in
the case of compounding). Thus, agent nouns have the meaning 'a
person who Vs' and noun-noun compounds, as we have seen, simply
mean 'an [N.sub.2] which has something to do with [N.sub.1]'
at the level of the pattern. But since in some words the abstract word
formation meaning is intimately tied up with the word meaning, the
latter may provoke an outright change in the semantic relation (cf.,
e.g., the mechanism of "regrouping" in Section 3.1.4.2) or at
least a shift of features in the semantic representation (cf., e.g., the
mechanism of "irradiation" in Section 3.2.1).

The dynamic nature of the lexicon, the existence of a semantic
surplus, and the relational nature of word formation meaning, together
with the general properties of human communication mentioned at the
beginning, are thus the main factors responsible for the pervasiveness
of reinterpretation in word formation. In the following discussion, I
will argue, in the spirit of Jaberg's hypothesis, that the process
of reinterpretation may be divided into two steps: the semantic change
of individual words (lexical semantic change) and the subsequent
rearrangement of formal and semantic elements.

3.1. Lexical semantic change

The study of lexical semantic change has been witnessing a revival
over the last two decades, especially within cognitive semantics,
culminating in the comprehensive typology of Blank (1997), which will
serve as the basis for the following discussion. In Chapter V of his
excellent monograph (cf. Blank 1997: 157-344), Blank distinguishes the
following eleven (14) mechanisms of semantic change ("Verfahren des
Bedeutungswandels"):

1. Metapher (metaphor)

2. Bedeutungserweiterung (extension of meaning)

3. Bedeutungsverengung (narrowing of meaning)

4. Kohyponymische Ubertragung (cohyponymic transfer)

5. Volksetymologie (folk etymology)

6. Antiphrasis (antiphrasis)

7. Auto-Antonymie (auto-antonymy)

8. Auto-Konverse (auto-converseness)

9. Analogischer Bedeutungswandel (analogical semantic change)

10. Metonymie (metonymy)

11. Ellipse (ellipsis)

Of these eleven mechanisms, those numbered 4, 6, 7, and 8 have
first been introduced by Blank himself, while the others are already in
Ullmann (1957), though not always with the same interpretation. The
newly introduced types, according to the author, "fallen von ihrem
reellen Aufkommen her kaum ins Gewicht neben den 'etablierten'
Typen" (Blank 1997: 343). (15)

The question that we will try to give an answer to in this section
is whether all types of lexical semantic change distinguished by Blank
may give rise in principle to reinterpretation in word formation, and
whether they do so to the same extent.

The answer to the first part of the question seems to be positive,
with one caveat: in order for a lexical semantic change to be able to
give rise to reinterpretation, it is necessary that the change in
question do not blur the relational nature of the pattern. Such a
process of demotivation has taken place, for example, in the change from
Latin panarium 'bread basket' (derived from pan-
'bread') to French panier 'basket,' where, due to
the extension of meaning, speakers are no longer aware of any relation
with French pain 'bread,' since 'bread' is no longer
part of the definition of panier, even though the ending is still
motivated by other words in -ier referring to containers, like cendrier
'ashtray' (from cendre 'ash'), encrier
'inkpot' (from encre 'ink'), etc. Through extension
of meaning, panier has thus lost its relational character, that is, it
is no longer paraphrasable by 'a container that has to do with x
(bread),' destroying, by the same token, the basis for a possible
reinterpretation of the suffix -ier on the basis of this word.

Apart from such cases, all types of lexical semantic change
distinguished by Blank seem to be able to give rise to reinterpretation
in principle. The analysis of a large number of cases of semantic change
in word formation in Romance and Germanic (German, English) suggests,
however, that not all types do so with the same frequency. (16)

3.1.1. Metonymy. The most important type of lexical semantic change
giving rise to reinterpretation, according to my sources, is metonymy,
which may simply be a consequence of the fact that contiguity, according
to Blank (1997: 344), is the most important relation for semantic change
in general. In cases of metonymic change, connotational or denotational
meanings are added to single complex words through pragmatic inferences,
which may then, in a second step, be directly linked to the word
formation pattern. In this way, for example, diminutives and
augmentatives often acquire pejorative or meliorative overtones, which
eventually may become associated with the respective patterns themselves
(cf. Blank 1998: 12-13). Thus, for example, the early Romance
augmentative suffix going back to the Latin relational suffix -aceus
turned into an exclusively pejorative suffix in Italian (cf.
appartamentaccio 'ugly flat,' from appartamento
'flat'), while in present-day peninsular Spanish it is mainly
augmentative-meliorative (cf. apartamentazo 'big, beautiful
flat,' from apartamento 'flat'). The starting point for
these divergent semantic changes must have lain, in the Italian case, in
contexts where a big exemplar of the referent of the base is generally
judged to be inferior to a normal-sized or small one, and vice versa in
the Spanish case. Two other examples of reinterpretation based on
metonymic lexical change have already been dealt with at the beginning
of Section 1, where Fleischman's account of the change of Old
French -age from the meaning 'tax' to collective and action
meaning has been reported. Further examples of inferences enriching the
meaning of complex words will be seen in Section 3.2.1 in the history of
Latin -aster.

3.1.2. Metaphor. Metaphor, though extremely important in lexical
semantic change in general, only very rarely seems to give rise to
reinterpretation of patterns of word formation. The reason for this
striking asymmetry may probably be found in the fact that it is rarely
possible to reanalyze a metaphorically-used complex word in such a way
that the meaning of the base remains intact while the new semantic
features may be associated with the (formal exponent of the) pattern. It
is difficult to see, for example, how the meaning 'muscle' of
Latin musculus, a shape-based metaphorical extension of the primary
meaning 'little mouse' (from mus 'mouse'), could be
divided into the features 'mouse' + 'X,' such that
'X' could come to be associated with the diminutive suffix
-culus and so eventually give rise to a new meaning of this suffix.

The standard example in the literature is the supposedly metaphoric
extension of agent nouns to designate instruments. One of the first
statements of this type of reinterpretation is the following one from
MeyerLubke's (1890) Italian grammar:

It is not quite clear as to how exactly Meyer-Lubke imagined this
passage from the agentive to the instrumental use of the Italian suffix
-tore. If he had in mind a Jabergian scenario, we would have to
hypothesize that in a first step some individual agent nouns were used
metaphorically as instrument nouns, and that in a second step the
instrumental meaning was attached directly to the pattern itself. The
passage quoted, however, also seems to allow a different reading, where
the act of metaphorization would have occurred at the very moment of the
creation of the first instrumental noun according to an originally
agentive pattern. In this latter scenario, which would correspond to
what I will call "approximation at the pattern level" in
Section 4.1, there need not have been at any moment in the history of
Italian a set of nouns presenting at the same time an agentive and an
instrumental reading. Though, thus, the empirical predictions of the two
possible analyses are quite distinct, there is no way at present to take
a principled decision on this matter, since neither MeyerLubke nor other
pertinent work on Italian word formation (cf. especially Kremer 1996) is
detailed enough to present crucial evidence. (18)

3.1.3. Absorption (ellipsis). A very important type of lexical
semantic change in Romance which gave rise to the reinterpretation of
patterns of word formation is absorption. The term
"absorption" was introduced into linguistics by Darmesteter
(1904 [1886]: 54-60), who described the process in the following terms:
"Il arrive [...] que de deux mots primitivement associes l'un
est supprime Cette ablation fait que le terme qui reste [... ] en
absorbe le sens." (19) Darmesteter's notion of absorption
resembles the somewhat fuzzy notion of contagion in Breal (1883:133
140). In Breal (1924 [1897]: 205) contagion is defined as
"phenomene [...] qui a pour effet de communiquer a un mot le sens
de son entourage." (20) Absorption, accordingly, may be defined as
a process where one linguistic unit takes over--"absorbs"--the
meaning of another unit which has disappeared through ellipsis.

Thus, for example, Latin ferrarius, originally a relational
adjective with the meaning 'related to iron' derived from
ferr- 'iron,' absorbed the meaning of faber 'worker, esp.
smith' when the term faber ferrarius was reduced to ferrarius
through ellipsis. The absorbed element 'worker' was then later
directly associated with the suffix -arius, which in this way acquired
the new meaning 'worker' in addition to its original
relational meaning. The mechanism of absorption has been of great
importance in the history of Latin and Romance due to the abundant use
of relational suffixes in Latin (cf. Ludtke 1995): thus, the Italian
instrumental suffix -ale of ditale 'thimble' (from dito
'finger') and similar formations goes back to the Latin
relational suffix -alis, the Spanish locative suffix -ar of melonar
'melonfield' (from melon 'melon'), and similar
formations to Latin -aris, the Italian locative suffix -ile of canile
'kennel' (from cane 'dog'), and similar formations
to Latin -ilis, Old French -age in the meaning 'tax,' as we
have already seen in Section 1, to Latin -aticus, to mention but a few
well-known cases. It seems plausible to assume that the more
parsimonious use of such suffixes in Germanic (21) might be responsible
for the fact that absorption seems to play a minor role in semantic
change in Germanic word formation.

But Germanic, on the other hand, possesses a type of absorption
absent from Romance, which is due to the tendency, repeatedly observed
by students of German word formation, to drop the middle part of overly
long compounds, whose meaning may then be absorbed by the first
constituent of these compounds. Thus, for example, Matussek (1994) shows
that Atom 'atom' as a first constituent of compounds has
developed the meaning 'nuclear power station,' probably
through the ellipsis of Kraftwerk 'power station' in compounds
like Atomkraftwerksgegner 'antinuclear activist,' lit.
'atom power station opponent.' In the same vein, an Atomgegner
'antinuclear activist' is not opposed to atoms, but to nuclear
power stations, just as an Atomminister is responsible not of atoms in
general but of nuclear power stations only. We thus see that the
frequency of certain types of reinterpretation is dependent on the
presence or absence of certain structural features in the languages in
question (importance of relational adjectives, compounding, etc.).

3.1.4. Folk etymology. The fourth type of lexical semantic change
which I will mention here because of its great importance for semantic
change in word formation is folk etymology. Folk etymology--the term was
loan translated by M. Muller in 1864 from German Volksetymologie,
launched in 1852 by E. Forstemann (cf. Hasenkamp 2002: 592)--is
traditionally defined as secondary motivation of an unmotivated or no
longer motivated word: Bussmann (2002: 741), for example, says that
"[d]urch diesen sprachhistorischen Prozess werden unverstandliche
Worter (sekundar) motiviert," (22) and Olschansky (1996: 107), in
her fundamental monograph, also considers the input of folk etymology to
be "ein synchron isoliertes und als solches unmotiviertes Wort bzw.
eine solche Wortkonstituente." (23) Two phenomena in the semantic
development of word formation, I think, may be ascribed to this
mechanism of change.

3.1.4.1. Adaptation. The first phenomenon will be called
"adaptation," adopting a term coined by the Viennese
sanscritist Alfred Ludwig (cf. Ludwig 1873; Delbruck 1884:66-73) and
defined in the following way by M. Bloomfield (1891: 1):

The term adaptation is used here to designate the infusion with
some definite grammatical or lexical value, of a formal element
originally either devoid of any special functional value, or possessed
of a value which has faded out so completely as to make this infusion
possible. (24)

A perfect example of adaptation in word formation is provided by
Jaberg's (1965) study on ordinal numbers and fractions in Romance.
As Jaberg shows, several western Romance languages, especially in their
older stages, have adapted the Latin distributive suffix -(e)nus (cf.
noveni 'nine ... each,' etc.) as a suffix for the formation of
ordinal numbers (cf. Spanish noveno 'ninth,' etc.). With
respect to the reasons for this surprising reinterpretation, Jaberg
notes:

3.1.4.2. Regrouping. The second phenomenon I will call
"regrouping," translating Leumann's (1973 [1944]) term
Umgruppierung. Folk etymology, as we have seen, is traditionally defined
as secondary motivation of an unmotivated or no longer motivated word. I
would like to propose now to slightly extend this definition and to
define folk etymology more generally as any kind of better motivation of
a word, motivated or unmotivated. Such a redefinition would allow us to
consider as a type of folk etymology a kind of reinterpretation that is
extremely frequent in the history of word formation. A case in point
would be the reinterpretation, mentioned at the beginning of this
article, of OHG slafkamara as 'room for sleeping' instead of
'room for sleep.' The difference with respect to adaptation is
that there can be no question of speakers having had difficulties with
the interpretation of slafkamara before the reinterpretation took place.
But for some reason, the verbal interpretation of the first constituent
must have appeared preferable to them. Interestingly Osthoff, who first
proposed this analysis in his 1878 monograph, already considered the
process to have occurred "gleichsam volksetymologisch"
(Osthoff 1878:15), that is, due to "a kind of folk etymology."
Once the reinterpretation had been completed, the new verb-noun pattern,
as pointed out by Osthoff (1878: 15), could be extended through the
mechanism of proportional analogy (cf. a word like Schiessubung
'shooting practice,' whose first constituent Schiess- 'to
shoot' can only be a verb, the corresponding noun being Schuss 'shot'), giving rise eventually to a highly productive pattern
of verb-noun compounds. This kind of reinterpretation has been
well-known since the nineteenth century at least. In the older
literature (cf., e.g., Darmesteter 1877; Collin 1918; but also Baldinger
1950) it is normally referred to as "(false) analogy," a
misleading expression since what is irregular in such formations is not
the analogy itself but the reinterpretation preceding the analogical
extension of the new pattern. Leumann's term, therefore, better
describes what is really happening in this process.

3.1.5. Other mechanisms. Metonymy, absorption, folk etymology
(adaptation and, especially, regrouping) and, to a limited extent,
metaphor have thus been found to be the most important types of lexical
semantic change which may lead to semantic change in patterns of word
formation. As already stated in Section 3.1, none of the remaining seven
mechanisms distinguished by Blank (1997) should be excluded in principle
from being able to give rise to new semantic patterns. For some,
especially extension and narrowing of meaning, the reason for the
absence may be that, as we have seen, they generally blur the relational
nature of the semantics of complex words and so destroy a necessary
condition for reinterpretation. With respect to the four rare mechanisms
newly introduced by Blank, viz. cohyponymic transfer, antiphrasis,
auto-antonomy, and auto-converseness, the absence of pertinent cases may
simply be due to their great rareness; nothing, for example, should
prevent in principle a diminutive pattern from turning into an
augmentative one through extended antiphrastic use of diminutives,
followed by a reinterpretation (e.g. by younger generations) that would
directly associate the contextually construed augmentative sense with
the morphological pattern itself.

As far as analogical semantic change is concerned, it certainly
also gave rise to new patterns of word formation. Here the problem is
that this mechanism is extremely difficult to pin down. In analogical
semantic change, according to Blank (1997: 317-323), a given relation of
polysemy is transferred from one word to another. So he argues with some
plausibility that the polysemy of the Italian noun gruccia, meaning both
'crutch' and, metaphorically, 'coat hanger,' has
recently been transferred to stampella 'crutch' through
proportional analogy. The problem is that it is normally very difficult
to decide whether the new word, in our case stampella 'coat
hanger,' is really the result of proportional analogy and not
rather of a parallel, independent semantic extension, in our case a
metaphor that would look at a coat hanger as a kind of crutch. For the
time being, I am not aware of any clear case where a new pattern should
have arisen on the basis of analogical semantic change, but it is easy
to imagine how this could happen. The meaning 'instrument,'
for example, could be analogically transferred from a complex word which
displays an agent/instrument polysemy to an agent noun formed according
to a purely agentive pattern, and this new instrumental formation could
then become the starting point of a new instrumental pattern.

3.2. Rearrangement of semantic and formal elements

We now come to the second step in the process of reinterpretation:
once one or more complex words have undergone semantic change, some
features of the new meaning may or, in some cases, even must become
attached to the pattern itself. I would like to argue that there are, in
fact, two different types of rearrangement to be distinguished, which
will be called "irradiation" and "restructuring."

3.2.1. Irradiation. The term "irradiation" (26) was
introduced into linguistics by Breal (1892: 20) with the following
definition: "un suffixe de signification generale et vague a
l'air de prendre une acception speciale et caracterisee, grace au
sens du mot auquel il est joint." (27) In Breal's
understanding, thus, the new meaning of a suffix in some cases
"irradiates" from the stem to the suffix. Though I will retain
Breal's term, I will not adopt his definition but rather that of
Serbat (1983: 534), (28) who rightly points out that it is always the
word meaning which induces the semantic change: "c'est le
signifie D [i.e. the word meaning] qui bouscule les limites entre
signifie S [i.e. the meaning of the pattern, or word formation meaning]
et le signifie B [i.e. the meaning of the base], et qui opere un
transfert semantique au benefice de S." (29) Irradiation may thus
be defined as the transfer of a "floating" semantic feature,
that is, a feature which has no immediate counterpart on the formal
side, from the word meaning to the word formation meaning.

The transferred floating semantic feature of the word meaning may
of course ultimately come from the base. A good example of this is
Bourquin's (1979) analysis of the emergence of the
"ethnic" variant of the French suffix -itude. Up to the middle
of the twentieth century, French-itude was essentially an unproductive
suffix present in de-adjectival abstract nouns like exactitude
'exactness,' etc. Things changed when, around 1935, Leopold
Senghor launched the term negritude, formed from negre 'negro,
black' after the model of servitude 'servitude,' in order
to refer to the peculiar traits of the black race and its social,
cultural, and political situation. The word immediately established
itself in intellectual circles, sparking off a whole series of similar
neologisms derived mainly from ethnic nouns or adjectives and
designating the peculiar traits of the social group referred to as well
as its emancipatory aspirations (cf. corsitude, from corse
'Corsican,' feminitude, from femin(in) 'feminine,'
etc.). In this case, the special connotations and associations (inferior
status, etc.) of the new suffix -itude are clearly traceable to negre,
the base of negritude. The example would thus be compatible with
Breal's more restrictive definition of irradiation.

But there are also clear cases where the semantic change cannot
have had its ultimate origin in the base. One convincing reconstruction
of the change of Latin -aster from a suffix expressing resemblance to a
pejorative suffix goes as follows (cf. Mutz 2000: 179-184): nouns like
oleaster 'wild olive tree' (from olea 'olive tree')
or filiaster 'stepson' (from filius 'son')
originally simply referred to something similar to an olive tree or
somebody similar to a son, while the pejorative connotation of -aster
seems to have arisen as a consequence of the negative opinions current
among Romans with respect to wild olive trees and stepsons. The
semantics of oleaster and filiaster has thus been enriched through
inferences typical of metonymic change before the new features were
passed on to the suffix via irradiation. Note that here, the irradiation
of the pejorative connotation cannot have originated in the bases, since
both olea and filius had positive connotations in Roman society.

The meaning element that irradiates from the word meaning may also
have its ultimate origin in a word dropped through the process of
ellipsis. We have already seen an example of this in Section 3.1.1, viz.
faber ferrarius > ferrarius, where the meaning 'worker'
first passed from faber to ferrarius and eventually came to be
associated directly with the suffix -arius, as the Romance languages
show (cf., e.g., Spanish herrero 'smith,' from hierro
'iron').

A fourth source where semantic elements that irradiate from the
word meaning to the pattern of word formation may ultimately come from
seems to be blending. If telegram is blended with cable to give
cablegram, the meaning of telegram may become definitively associated
with -gram and so give rise to a new series of words with a second
element -gram with the meaning 'telegram.'

3.2.2. Restructuring. Restructuring will be defined as change in
constituent structure as a consequence of change in meaning. While
irradiation may occur with a certain temporal delay, restructuring by
necessity occurs simultaneously with the semantic change that triggers
it. When, for example, medieval speakers of German began to prefer
'room for sleeping' to the reading 'room for sleep'
as the best interpretation of slafkamara (cf. Section 1), they could not
escape changing the constituent structure from noun-noun to verb-noun.

4. Approximation

Just as the pervasiveness of reinterpretation was motivated at the
beginning of Section 3 on the ground of general features of human
communication and word formation, the existence of the second
fundamental kind of mechanism of semantic change in word formation, viz.
approximation, is also to be expected under the following two general
premises. On the one hand, the coining of complex words is not
understood as an algorithmic process combining a list of morphemes
according to a closed set of rules, but rather as an essentially
pattern-based process, where the pattern that serves as a model may lie
somewhere between the two extremes of a single complex word and a
relatively abstract, rule-like pattern. On the other hand, it is assumed
that human communication, in order to be effective, does not require a
100% match between model and copy, pattern and neologism (cf. Gloning
1996:152). An approximation, in many cases, will suffice if the hearer
is able to bridge by inference the distance between model and copy. This
is especially the case if model and copy are linked by metaphor or
metonymy.

Approximation will thus be defined as a process of word formation
where the relation between a pattern of word formation and a neologism
formed according to it is not one to one, but mediated by metaphor or
metonymy. Note that metaphor or metonymy here intervene in the very act
of forming a neologism according to a pattern, while in the Jabergian
scenarios discussed in Section 3, metaphor and metonymy (among other
mechanisms of lexical semantic change) were applied to existing lexical
items prior to irradiation or restructuring (in this second case
"prior" only in the logical, not the temporal sense of the
word). Approximation will further be divided into two subtypes,
according to whether the metaphoric or metonymic mediation is located at
the level of the pattern as a whole or at the level of the base.

4.1. Approximation at the pattern level

Approximation at the pattern level may be illustrated by the
sporadic temporal use of the locative prefix cis-, which we have already
encountered in Section 2, described in the following terms in Marchand
(1969 [1962]: 150): "the words cis-Elisabethan 1870 and
cis-reformation (time) 1662 transfer the notion of place into that of
time. The meaning here is 'belonging to the time after -,
subsequent to -'." Note that this semantic change of the
prefix cis- from its proper spatial meaning to a temporal one cannot be
accounted for in Jabergian terms. It was not the case that some
individual adjective of the locative type cisalpine underwent a semantic
change from the realm of space to that of time--no such case is
documented nor is it easy to imagine how such a change could come about
with subsequent irradiation of the new temporal meaning to the prefix
cis-; the temporal meaning must have arisen at the very moment of the
creation of the adjectives cis-reformation and cis-Elisabethan. The
speakers or writers simply used the pattern itself in a metaphoric
manner, relying on the pervasive conceptual metaphor TIME-RELATIONS AS
SPACE-RELATIONS.

Another clear case in point is constituted by the ludic variant of
the suffix -itis. The proper meaning of this suffix is
'inflammation of x,' where 'x' designates a part of
the body, as in tonsillitis, etc. In the second half of the nineteenth
century (cf. Schweickard 1993), however, the suffix is beginning to be
attached, with a clearly ludic intention, to words other than parts of
the body in order to refer to some metaphorical "disease":
fiscalitis (1903), telephonitis (1935), electionitis (1945), etc. This
semantic change, again, is not amenable to the Jabergian mechanism of
reinterpretation, since it was not the case that some existing medical
term in -itis underwent a semantic change that eventually led to the
irradiation on to the suffix itself of the new meaning 'excessive
tendency to x.' Rather, we must assume that the first person to
coin a ludic formation of that kind consciously overextended the pattern
of nouns in -itis with the intention of assimilating some kind of
excessive tendency to a disease. The gist of these formations precisely
relies on the implicit metaphor EXCESSIVE TENDENCY AS DISEASE. (30)
Contrary to the c/s-case seen before, the ludic variant of-itis in the
meantime has become a productive pattern in most European languages.
(31)

4.2. Approximation at the base level

In the cases just seen of approximation at the pattern level, the
copy (neologism or pattern, if it becomes productive) and the model
pertain to different semantic categories: space vs. time, inflammation
vs. excessive tendency, etc. In the cases of approximation at the base
level, on the contrary, model and copy as such are categorially
identical, differing only in the semantic category of the base (and,
possibly, the semantic relation between base and affix or the two bases,
in the case of compounds). Again, this semantic change does not come
about through Jabergian reinterpretation of an existing complex word,
but at the very moment of the coining of the neologism. What happens
here is that the speaker or writer, while forming the neologism,
switches from the semantic category normally required by the base to a
metaphorically or metonymically related category.

Metonymic approximation at the base level may be illustrated by
Spanish -era in its use as a suffix forming designations of recipients
(cf. Rainer 1993: 477-478). In its proper use, the base designates the
thing(s) contained in the recipient: chequera 'checkbook'
(from cheque 'cheque'), tabaquera 'tobacco tin'
(from tabaco 'tobacco'), nevera 'refrigerator; cf. Am.
ice box (from nieve 'snow'), etc. All actual formations and
neologisms follow this pattern, except mariconera and fresquera. When,
several decades ago, men's handbags came into use, they
embarassingly reminded Spaniards of women's handbags and received
the contemptuous name mariconera lit. 'bag (recipient) suitable for
gay people' (from maricon 'gay,' a common insult). The
base, in this instance, does no longer refer to the content of the
recipient, as in the target pattern, but to its bearer, a metonymically
related concept. This metonymic switch, on the one hand, may have been
due to the ensuing ludic effect, but on the other, one should not forget
that the content of a handbag is heterogeneous and thus not very
salient, which could have been another reason for choosing as a base the
more salient bearer of this kind of handbag, considered to be typically
an effeminate person. A similar motivation is probably also responsible
for the anomaly observable in fresquera, the Spanish ancestor of the
refrigerator, that is, a cupboard with a grille located in a shady and
droughty place of the house, which is derived from the adjective fresco
'fresh.' Again, the base does not designate the content of the
recipient, but rather its function: it served to keep food fresh. The
metonymic switch may again have been motivated by the heterogeneity, and
hence low saliency of the content of this kind of recipient. In this
first example of approximation at the base level, just as in the
cis-case discussed in Section 4.1, the two neologisms remained isolated
and did not spark off productive patterns of the type 'recipient
typically used by x' or 'recipient serving to keep things
x.' Whether this is the case or not, however, is a question
concerning diffusion and not innovation. According to the theory
defended in this article, innovation can happen in two ways, either via
reinterpretation or via approximation, while the question of whether the
neologism formed according to one of these two types of change later on
acts as a leader word for the creation of a new productive pattern or
not, is a different matter. (32)

It seems that approximation at the base level may also be of a
metaphoric nature. A case in point is the Spanish suffix -uno forming
adjectives from animal nouns: caballuno 'horse-(like)' (from
caballo 'horse'), perruno 'dog-(like)' (from perro
'dog'), etc. As Malkiel (1959) has shown, this suffix was
extended to human bases during the Renaissance in order to convey
derogatory overtones: frailuno 'monkish' (from fraile
'monk'), lacayuno 'servile' (from lacayo
'lackey'), etc. Through the switch in semantic category (from
animal to human), the speakers or writers here probably wanted to
establish an implicit comparison between animals on the one side, and
monks or lackeys on the other. It has been pointed out to me that a case
of metaphoric approximation at the base level such as this one is not
easy to distinguish from what we have called "irradiation" in
Section 3.2.1. If we would like to analyze the present case as one of
irradiation, we would have to say that one of the established
formations, let's say perruno, has acquired negative connotations
subsequently transferred on to the suffix -uno via irradiation.
Neologisms such as frailuno or lacayuno then could have been formed on
the model of perruno by simple proportional analogy. The decision
between these two analyses is not obvious and hinges on whether one
thinks that the coiners of these neologisms have had ludic intentions
(implicit HUMAN AS ANIMAL metaphor) or not. The important point is to
see the difference between irradiation and approximation at the base
level. (33) The example further illustrates how important it may be to
have very detailed information in order to establish the exact nature of
a change.

As another case in point we may adduce the Spanish suffix -ezno,
present in a handful of designations of young animals: lobezno
'cub' (from lobo 'wolf'), osezno 'cub'
(from oso 'bear'), etc. In Old Spanish, as Yndurdin (1952)
reports, this suffix was also applied to two bases referring to humans,
probably with jocular or derogatory intentions, namely judezno
'Jewish child' (from judio 'Jew') and morezno
'Moorish child' (from moro 'Moor'). As one can see,
the pattern remained stable, while the base was metaphorically extended
to young children. It has been pointed out to me that this might just as
well be a case of analogical expansion (or generalization). Since
analogical expansion of the domain of a pattern of word formation in
general affects semantically (and/or formally) similar bases and
similarity is also crucially involved in metaphor, the interpretation
may indeed remain unclear in some cases. In the present case, the fact
that there is no objective similarity between Jewish and Moorish
children and young animals that would not also obtain for Christian
children would seem to me to speak in favor of a metaphorical account,
which implies that the similarity was created purposefully by way of
metaphorical approximation. That's also the way Yndurain
interpreted these examples, but a final decision again is impossible at
a distance of several centuries. (34)

Both metonymic and metaphoric approximation at the base level are
quite common in word formation though, to the best of my knowledge, they
have not yet received much attention, or even a name, in the literature.
This may be due to the fact that its detection presupposes a thorough
analysis of the restrictions of the patterns involved, which is yet
another neglected area of studies in word formation.

5. Conclusion

By way of conclusion, let us briefly summarize the main results of
this article. We started out with Jaberg's hypothesis, according to
which all kinds of semantic change in word formation are due to the
mechanism we have called "reinterpretation," that is, a
combination of lexical semantic change in individual words plus
irradiation/restructuring. We have found that this mechanism is in fact
the most important, but not the only one. On the one hand, semantic
change in word formation may also be due to redefinition, affecting
directly the pattern itself, especially in languages for specific
purposes, but such redefinitions were judged not to be directly relevant
to the evaluation of Jaberg's hypothesis, since they have their
place not in a theory of meaning but in a more general theory of
communication. On the other hand, however, we have also found cases
where the semantic change occurred at the very moment of the coining of
a neologism through a mechanism which we called
"approximation" and which we found to be fundamentally
different from reinterpretation. Approximation, which may operate at the
pattern and at the base level, effectively falsifies Jaberg's
claim, but nicely fits into a holistic conception of word formation
which does not require the copies to be one hundred percent identical to
the models, but tolerates deviations, especially if mediated by metaphor
or metonymy.

Received 19 November 2002

Revised version received

+18 June 2003

Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration

Notes

(1.) Earlier versions of this paper have been presented to
audiences at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the 10th International
Morphology Meeting (Szentendre, Hungary), the universities of Tubingen,
Graz, and Konstanz. For helpful comments I would like to thank, among
others, Wolfgang U. Dressier, Peter Koch, Walter Waltereit, and Davide
Ricca, as well as two anonymous reviewers. All remaining shortcomings,
of course, are of my own responsibility. Correspondence address:
Institut fur romanische Sprachen, Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien,
Nordbergstr. 15, A-1090 Vienna, Austria. E-mail:
Franz.Rainer@wu-wien.ac.at.

(2.) Others would prefer the term "rule" instead of
"pattern." The present article is meant to be agnostic with
respect to the ongoing rule/analogy controversy in morphology.

(3.) Translation: "The starting point is constituted
undoubtedly by words with, in first position, a noun which could also be
interpreted as a verb-stem. Schlafkammer ['bedroom:' lit.
'sleep room'; F.R.], OHG slafkamara, is an old noun-noun
compound, as the other formations with slaf- show; nevertheless, we
interpret the first constituent as a verb, and the same ambiguous and
undecided situation may be found with many more cases like Werktag
(Engl. workday), Baustein ['building block,' the first
constituent meaning both 'construction' and 'to
build'], Ruhebett ['bed;' lit. 'rest bed', the
first constituent meaning both 'rest' and 'to
rest'], reisefertig ['ready (to leave),' the first
constituent meaning both 'journey' and 'to leave'].
This evolution began in Old High German."

(4.) Slafkamara, of course, only serves an illustrative purpose
here. Osthoff (1878: 12-15) claims to have detected two gothic verb-noun
compounds in Wulfila's translation of the bible, which would be the
oldest extant examples, if his claim is correct.

(5.) Since Jaberg reviewed a study on the semantic development of
the Latin suffix -mentum in French, his considerations are restricted to
suffixation, but he probably meant it to be valid for word formation in
general. In the present article, we will deal with all kinds of word
formation.

(6.) Translation: "What we call the meaning of a suffix is not
an independent concept; it is only the constant modification of
different fundamental concepts. For linguistic consciousness stem and
suffix form one single concept."

(7.) Translation: "The suffix alone thus cannot change its
meaning, it only changes it together with the stem. But as soon as a
number of words formed by the same suffix change their meaning in the
same direction, the function of the suffix also changes; we say: it has
received a new 'meaning.' This is manifest from the fact that
new derivatives are formed with the suffix in its new meaning. From what
we have said, the following methodological claims may be derived: 1) the
semantic change of a suffix has to be explained on the basis of the
semantic change of individual words; 2) there has to be made a
principled distinction between semantic change of single words and
neologisms on the basis of a new meaning of a suffix."

(8.) Jaberg's theory is explicitly endorsed by Collin (1918).
In the later Romance literature, I have not found any explicit
references to Jaberg's review, but his views seem to be implicit in
most work on semantic change in word formation by Romance scholars of
the 20th century (cf., e.g., Gamillscheg 1921; Wartburg 1923; Baldinger
1950; and various works by Malkiel).

(9.) I am indebted to Arnold Leitner, an expert in metrology, for
this information.

(10.) Up to this point, I have used the term
"reanalysis." But since this term is used in different ways by
different linguists, I have decided to avoid it altogether in the
terminology of semantic change which I am going to propose. Many cases
of what is commonly referred to as "reanalysis" will here be
called "reinterpretation," but the terms are not coextensive.
So, for example, the change from Latin roma-nus 'Roman' (from
Roma 'Rome') to rom-anus, which gave rise to the suffix -anus,
is commonly also considered as a case of reanalysis, but it is not a
case of reinterpretation in my terminology, since no semantic change but
simply a shift in morpheme boundary is involved. Reanalysis may, of
course, continue to be useful as a generic term for a cluster of
semantic and structural changes related in a yet to be defined way.

(11.) The latter term was first introduced in Rainer (2003).

(12.) Translation: "a ready-made mass."

(13.) Translation: "a continuous production and reproduction
of the word-formational capacity."

(14.) To these eleven mechanisms, Blank adds two
"secondary" mechanisms: Bedeutungsverstarkung
('strengthening of meaning') and Bedeutungsahschwachung
('weakening of meaning'). They do not alter the semantics
proper of a word but rather its domain of application, for example, from
expressive to neutral, from standard to archaic, from regional to
standard, etc. These secondary mechanisms qualify as kinds of semantic
change only if the characterization of the domain of application of a
word is considered as part of its semantics.

(15.) Translation: "are marginal as far as effective frequency
is concerned, compared to the 'established' types."

(16.) Estimates of the frequency of the different mechanisms are
intuitive and not based on explicit statistics, since this would
presuppose that every case of semantic change encountered in the main
handbooks on historical word formation may be attributed to one or the
other mechanism. Unfortunately, as I have already stated, many
descriptions are too vague to allow us to do so with some confidence.
The intuitive estimates, however, are made on a conservative basis.

(17.) Translation: "On the basis of a frequently occurring
metaphor the instrument, with which an action is executed, may be
thought of as the executor, that is, as a person, and in this way one
may create designations of instruments with suffixes properly reserved
for human beings."

(18.) Since actor and instrument show a metonymic relationship (the
actor uses the instrument), one might also want to consider, as one
anonymous reviewer has suggested, the possibility of a metonymical interpretation of the semantic extension of -tore. Note, however, that
metonymic relationships between actor and instrument normally seem to
work in the opposite direction: it is not uncommon for an actor to be
referred to by the name of a characteristic instrument (cf. French
violon, meaning both 'violin' and 'violinist,' and
many similar examples), but the opposite extension does not seem to
occur, at least with simple words. Detailed studies on the history of
tore in Italian and of -dor in Spanish, undertaken after the completion
of the present article (cf. Rainer 2004a, 2004b), suggest that no
semantic change was involved in these two languages, and in Romance in
general.

(19.) Translation: "Sometimes one of two originally linked
words is suppressed. This suppression causes the remaining word to
absorb its meaning."

(20.) Translation: "a phenomenon which has the effect of
communicating to a word the meaning of its context."

(21.) The most common translation into German of a Latin or Romance
noun phrase containing a relational adjective is a noun-noun compound.
German relational adjectives, furthermore, generally pertain to the
learned layer of the lexicon.

(22.) Translation: "through this process of linguistic change
incomprehensible words are provided with a (secondary) motivation."

(23.) Translation: "a synchronically isolated and as such
unmotivated word or a constituent of a word with these same
characteristics."

(24.) This definition closely matches that of
"exaptation" in Lass (1990: 80): "Exaptation [...] is the
opportunistic co-optation of a feature whose origin is unrelated or only
marginally related to its later use." Lass does not seem to have
been aware of having reinvented adaptation.

(25.) Translation: "Two factors, I think, have supported this
development: since its proper function was rendered with syntactic means
in the vulgar language, -ENUS had become superfluous, unemployed so to
speak, and hence can be used for other functions [...]. To this one has
to add a second factor. From the beginning of the Middle Ages novena is
a much-used word throughout Christendom for a prayer of nine days in
honor of a saint or in memory of a deceased person (cf. Du Cange, s.v.).
Should not this important ecclesiastic word have provided -ENUS with a
special saliency and supported its use in the series of ordinal numbers,
all the more as this word could also designate the funeral service on
the ninth day after the death (cf. Levy, Prov. Suppl. Wb.) and the
number nine played an important role in law, customs, and
traditions?"

(26.) Different metaphors used in the literature to refer to the
same or a similar phenomenon are Abfarben 'coming off (said of
colors)' (cf., e.g., Spitzer 1910: 134; Baldinger 1950: 119-121) or
tainting of suffixes (Jespersen 1922: 388).

(27.) Translation: "a suffix with a general and vague
semantics seems to acquire a more specific meaning due to the meaning of
the word it is joined to."

(28.) Cf. also Brachet (1999).

(29.) Translation: "It is meaning D [i.e. the word meaning]
which overturns the limits between meaning S [i.e. the meaning of the
pattern, or word formation meaning] and meaning B [i.e. the meaning of
the base], and which causes a semantic transfer in favor of S."

(30.) A similar metaphorical extension, by the way, had already
taken place about one hundred years before with words in -mania (cf.
Hofler 1972). This metaphorical use of -mania may well have facilitated
the metaphorical use of -itis.

(31.) I have not yet found any clear example of metonymic
approximation at the pattern level. Whether this is a lacuna in my
documentation or has some deeper significance, I cannot say at present.

(32.) A detailed discussion of a case where several cases of
approximation at the base level have turned into productive subpatterns,
viz. the Spanish suffix -azo, may be found in Rainer (2003).

(33.) In lexical semantic change, it is also impossible sometimes
to decide which mechanism of change has been applied in some particular
case. So we can be sure that French bougogne 'Burgundy (wine)'
is either the result of a metonymical extension of the name of the
homonymous region of France or of an ellipsis of vin de in vin de
Bourgogne 'wine from Burgundy," but without more detailed
historical information, we cannot be sure which mechanism has been at
work. Such a state of indecision must not be viewed, of course, as proof
that metonymy and ellipsis are one and the same thing!

(34.) Even a third possible analysis might be proposed. The above
analysis presupposes that children and young animals form a unitary
category, which is of course true from a biological perspective. Natural
languages, at least Spanish and other European languages, however, treat
them as distinct categories (cf. Spanish nino, crio 'child'
vs. cria, cachorro 'young animal'). If -ezno were given the
more specific meaning 'young animal,' the application to human
bases could be seen as a case of metaphorical approximation at the
pattern level.